Amber Chandler, NBCT

Amber Chandler is a National Board Certified ELA teacher and author of The Flexible ELA Classroom: Differentiation Tools for 4-8 due out in September. She is an America Achieves Lead Fellow in the Coaching Op-Eds and Blogging role. Amber is a Content Partner with ShareMyLesson.com and provides Professional Development through her webinars for the site. She is a regular contributor to MiddleWeb.com, GettingSmart.com, and AMLE magazine. Amber's expertise is in Project Based Learning and Differentiation. She is a Candidate Support Provider and looks forward to working with National Board Candidates. Follow her on Twitter @MsAmberChandler, and visit her website doyoudifferentiate.com for teacher collaboration, resources, and her latest blogs.

Are you creative? Left-brained? Right-brained? Most people are quick to answer these questions without truly understanding the nature of creativity. In the classroom, this lack of concrete knowledge about creativity can severely limit both our teaching and our students’ learning. Students’ self-perceptions are so often simply a regurgitation of what their parents have decided about them, or worse, an analysis of themselves based on internet quizzes and polls. Unfortunately, pop culture quizzes become regarded as science itself, and even educators are guilty of silo-ing students into rigid categories based on very limited information, particularly students’ self-assessments. For example, my results…

When I teach the word “palpable,” I explain to my students that sometimes the energy is so strong in a room that you can feel it. Last month, after a long day of school, I walked into the ballroom at the Marriott Harborcenter in Buffalo, New York and there was an electricity that energized me immediately. We were gathered for the New York Summit on Teacher Leadership. There was a buzz in the air, the aroma of yummy food, and a palpable excitement. This, in itself, is quite a feat. I’d only had a small commute over the Skyway, but…

Do you ever have an “Ah Ha” moment, only to wonder what was possibly wrong with you that you didn’t make the connection before? For example, the first time I discovered that cream cheese and jelly are a fabulous combination on crackers. It was perfectly obvious that this would be a delectable duo, but yet I had never put the two together! Well, an “ah ha” moment of this variety happened to me at a candidate support training. I’ve been thinking about connecting my experiences as an NBCT with Carol Dweck’s “Growth Mindset,” but it took a whole room of…